Gold cobs are the
original doubloons, the very treasure sought most by pirates. Struck by hand at
the mints of Mexico, Peru and Colombia, and also at mainland Spanish mints like
Seville and Toledo, gold cobs denoted extreme value even in their own day and
facilitated the movement of vast sums of money across the seas, where inevitably
many of them ended up. In fact, the single largest source of gold cobs remains
the Spanish 1715 Fleet off the east coast of Florida, which is where many of the
cobs you see here were found.